Momentum for school choice

(Except in Illinois)

April 28, 2012

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has pushed an ambitious voucher program for students from modest means. (Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

About half the students in Louisiana are about to get a chance to choose the best school for themselves. That's the impact of the amazingly ambitious school reform program engineered by Gov. Bobby Jindal. Some 380,000 poor and middle-class students in low-performing schools will be offered a voucher worth up to $8,500. They can choose a school, they can line up a local business apprenticeship, they can take online classes toward a diploma.

The Bayou State is part of a "Top this!" competition among many states to open public schools to competition. Indiana has set up an expansive voucher program that covers students in families that have incomes below $61,000 a year. Wisconsin has expanded school choice programs in Milwaukee and Racine. Ohio will give tuition vouchers to as many as 60,000 students by 2013.

And Illinois? Left in the dust.

A bill that would have offered private school tuition support to as many as 30,000 Chicago kids came close to passing a couple of years ago. The latest version is languishing in the Senate assignments committee.

"My hope is that we're going to have the opportunity to raise this issue again," says state Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine. "We've got to get people focused on the need to inject more competition in education. The schools we're talking about in this bill don't have anything to lose."

Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard surprised some people when he recently voiced support for the idea of public dollars "following" students to schools of their choice. "It doesn't make sense (that) our parents pay taxes and then pay tuition (for their children) to go to (private) school as well ... It's a matter of making sure the dollars follow children. If 500 traditional CPS (students) would go to the parochial schools ... the proportional share (of dollars) should go to the school actually educating those children."

That's just another way of saying vouchers, even though a CPS spokesman said Brizard's statement was his personal opinion and that he was not recommending the state adopt school vouchers.

That's not a huge reach, though. CPS was OK with the voucher bill that passed the state Senate in 2010. One big reason: CPS stood to come out ahead financially. The cash-strapped Chicago system would have saved the cost of educating thousands of students and would have kept some of the state aid attached to those students. The bill would have taken some pressure off of CPS and allowed children in poorly performing schools to find alternatives.

Schools across the state face mounting financial pressures. In Chicago, teacher pension costs are set to explode in 2014 and beyond. The Legislature may push more pension costs on to suburban and downstate districts. School choice would help to ease those pressures.

Major school reforms are happening in Illinois. They should boost academic prospects here. We applauded the governor and the Legislature for passing a groundbreaking reform bill last year. But the state can still give children more options and ease some of the financial pressures on public schools.